Office 365 Weekly Digest | July 29 – August 4, 2018

08/06/2018

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Welcome to the July 29 – August 4, 2018 edition of the Office 365 Weekly Digest.

Again, only three new additions to the Office 365 Roadmap last week including a change in Yammer to make SharePoint the default file location, new clean icons in Outlook for Windows, and enhancements to search in SharePoint Online.

The recording for the Modern Workplace Friday Fire Away session on August 3rd is now available. Don't forget about the Microsoft Teams AMA this week on August 9, 2018 at 9am Pacific.

Lots of content in the Blog Roundup for last week, including the monthly summary for Microsoft 365 and Teams, a new guided workflow for deleting users in Microsoft 365, live events with Microsoft Stream and preparing for TLS 1.0/1.1 deprecation in Skype for Business.

Wrapping up the post are noteworthy items including the latest update to the Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges, improved editing in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, recent OneDrive for Business Message Center updates, and availability of a new approver role for Customer Lockbox.

When: On-demand, registration required | Microsoft is updating the publishing of Office 365 network endpoints and has new guidance about optimizing network connectivity for end users to achieve optimal performance. In this talk we will describe the new network principles and guidance and share how the updated endpoint publishing makes end user performance easier to achieve. We will outline the timeline and transition from the current manually published data to the new system and how customers can take advantage of this. | Resource: Office 365 endpoint categories and Office 365 IP Address and URL web service

When: On-demand | If you were not able to join the August 3, 2018 edition of "HLS Modern Workplace Fire Away Friday", then the recording is now available. It was the first delivery of a live public event using the new Microsoft Live Events using Microsoft Stream. During this webcast we covered: (1) The Modern Workplace Top 3, (2) Microsoft Intelligent Events - Live Events for Stream, Yammer, and Teams, and (3) Open Forum Q&A.

When: Thursday, August 9, 2018 at 9am PT | We are very excited to announce a Microsoft Teams 'Ask Microsoft Anything' (AMA) for Microsoft Teams! An AMA is a live online event similar to a "YamJam" on Yammer or an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. The AMA will take place on Thursday, August 9th, 2018 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with members of the product engineering team who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback. Join in the Microsoft Teams AMA Group, or add it to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

When: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 12pm ET and 3pm ET | This 90-minute hands-on experience will give you the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. A trained facilitator will guide you as you apply these tools to your own business scenarios and see how they work for you. During this interactive session, you will: (1) Discover how you can keep your information more secure without inhibiting your workflow, (2) Learn how to visualize and analyze complex data, quickly zeroing in on the insights you need, (3) See how multiple team members can access, edit and review documents simultaneously, and (4) Gain skills that will save you time and simplify your workflow immediately. Each session is limited to 12 participants, reserve your seat now.

The August Roundup for Microsoft Teams details the latest enhancements across the following areas: (1) Communicate more seamlessly, (2) Collaborate more effectively, (3) Customize your team with third-party integrations, (4) New features available for IT admins, (5) New data and reports for Teams, and (6) New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps. Some of the specific enhancements referenced in the post include the free version of Microsoft Teams, enhancements to the Teams and Skype for Business admin center, and the inclusion of Teams data in the Power BI usage analytics for Microsoft 365. | Related: Answer Auto Attendant and Call Queue calls directly from Teams

In July 2018, we hosted 17,000 attendees at Microsoft Inspire, our annual partner conference, and announced a set of new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enhance teamwork—including a free version of Microsoft Teams. We also rolled out a number of new features across Microsoft 365 to help organizations empower their employees—including updates that streamline the management of common tasks and improve data visualization. Some of the features released in July include: (1) Microsoft Planner capabilities in SharePoint team sites, (2) Microsoft 365 usage analytics in Power BI, (3) Threaded comments in Microsoft Excel, and more.

As an IT admin, there are certain tasks and process that happen almost daily. We're using customer feedback to identify those common tasks and make them easier and faster to perform with repeatable results. Deleting a user when they leave an organization is one of those common tasks. From the IT side, it can take multiple steps to offboard a user. From the business side, it can be easy to lose valuable data stored in the user's documents and email. We're combining the steps it takes to delete a user, retain their documents, and retain their email into a single workflow with in-context guidance. This guided workflow is available now to all Microsoft 365 admins.

Leaders have found video to be a powerful way to align and engage employees around their organizations' culture of work. This is especially true as mobile workforces continue to grow, and employees increasingly need to consume content on the go. We invite you to use the public preview of live events in Yammer to help foster deeper connections between leaders and employees across your organization. But inside the enterprise, live events usually are much more than just a 30-minute address from the CEO. They need to be planned. We've spoken to many customers about how they run townhall style meetings and it becomes clear that there are three main phases that both the team organizing the event and the people who will be watching it generally go through.

We are planning to discontinue support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions 1.0 and 1.1 in Microsoft Office 365 on October 31, 2018. This change will provide our customers with the best-in-class encryption for our customers. The purpose of this blog post is to provide the necessary guidance for our Skype for Business Server, Lync Server, and Skype for Business Online customers to prepare for the deprecation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Office 365. Please carefully review all the information in this blog post as you prepare for the mandatory use of TLS 1.2 in Office 365. Note that there may be many dependencies and connectivity considerations in your environment, so extensive planning and testing is advised.

A few weeks ago at Microsoft Inspire 2018, we announced that Microsoft Stream will power the live events in Microsoft 365, and now the preview is here! You can now get started creating live events using Microsoft Stream for your organization. Schedule, produce and deliver live events more effectively for a variety of scenarios like companywide events, leadership updates and more, to connect with your internal audience in a more personable way. You can schedule, produce and deliver live events using a single bitrate RTMP or RTMPS stream from an encoder – we'll take care of all the transcoding for adaptive bitrate delivery so your viewers have a seamless streaming experience. And just like any other video in Microsoft Stream, you can make the live event open to your entire company or limit the access to specific groups or people.

We've introduced a more collaborative web experience for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Now, when you click a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file in OneDrive for Business or open a sharing link to a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file in your browser, you will open directly into edit mode, allowing you to jump into work faster than ever. Note: You cannot change the default behavior for your tenant to default open in Reading View. We are exploring creating a setting to set the default open behavior for Document Libraries.

This post is a recap of OneDrive Message Center posts from the past two weeks. We are excited to announce great improvements to the OneDrive Android apps and we've reorganized our documentation to make it easier for you to find answers and stay on top of things. We also have an update to our previously announced versioning experience based on your feedback. The post for July 16 - 31, 2018 includes information on the following updates: (1) New OneDrive documentation hub, (2) Update to OneDrive and SharePoint versioning changes, (3) OneDrive remembers your preferred column sorting, and (4) several Android app features such as a new scan experience and improved upload progress experience.

Until recently, approving or denying Customer Lockbox requests was reserved to the Global Administrator. Now, we are announcing the availability of a new custom administrator role: Customer Lockbox access approver. This new custom role and the members of this role are now allowed to configure, approve and deny Customer Lockbox requests. This has been a key ask from customers who want to add, for example, non-IT roles such as a compliance officer, data protection officer or legal officer to approve privileged access to their Office 365 content by Microsoft personnel during support operations.

It does not matter how encrypted the data is when at-rest or in-transit, how locked down the computer is, the type of security (i.e. antivirus) software and the type of firewall that is deployed. At the end of the day, if I have your identity, in other words your username and password – it's game over. With your credentials, I have keys to the kingdom (so to speak). If you are an IT administrator and I have your credentials, then it's really game over. With those credentials I can traverse the environment, login to virtually every line of business app from finance to customer databases to email mailboxes. The best part - without the proper technologies in place, you may not know it's happening until it's too late. So how do you secure access and protect the data if you don't know where it lives? Simple: through a security strategy that incorporates: Identity, access management, and information protection. Identity is the new firewall, and data authorization must be tied to the user's identity. For this to work, you need a unified set of credentials. You need a single identity. This is where Azure Active Directory comes in. Not only is this single set of credentials used to access Office 365, but it's also used to access your Windows PC and can even be used to access 3rd party cloud apps such as G-Suite, Box and Salesforce. | Related: Protect your data in files, apps, and devices

We are excited to share the details of a brand new roles and administrators experience to make managing and controlling user assignments easier than ever in Azure AD. The new roles and administrators feature—now in preview—provides you with a complete list and description of the built-in directory roles, a streamlined process to manage roles, and links to relevant documentation to help you utilize directory roles. Now you can quickly answer questions like "How many global administrators do I have?" or "What are my assigned roles?" In addition to role permission details, we included links to relevant documentation to help you best utilize directory roles. But that's not all… We also updated the user profile experience, so you can see all the roles assigned to a user—such as user, global administrator, or limited administrator. You can also add roles from a menu of roles not yet assigned—streamlining the role assignment process.